Sunday, February 01, 2009

ICICI bank ATM gives out fake Rs.500/- note

My classmate and colleague who is working in my office drew a substantial amount on Friday, 30-Jan-2009 from the Nelson Manickam Road ICICI ATM in order to pay this at the post office towards NSC for tax savings.

We do have an ICICI ATM at the Nelson Manickam Road office as well, but more often than not, it carries only Rs.100/- denominations - quite painful in case you want a large sum, hence the need to go directly to the bank's ATM.

Anyway, so when he took the amount to the post office for deposit, the person at the counter initially laid out 5-6 Rs.500/- notes suspecting them to be fake. Under more stringent verification, also with the help of a scanner-cum-counting device, they isolated just one Rs.500/- note to be fake and refused to accept it. When told that it was just then drawn at the ICICI bank ATM at N.M.Road branch, their comment was that these kind of things appear to happen quite often with ICICI but never with SBI or such.

My shocked friend took it back to the bank asking for an explanation. The person at the bank counter started arguing and giving possible alternate explanations that my friend could have mixed up notes drawn from the ATM with those from elsewhere, etc and when my friend started pressing and arguing with them, the bank person had a sudden change of mind and exchanged the note.

It leaves me with a scary feeling that if fake notes can be dispensed from an ATM, then where is the chance for normal people to rest assured ??!!

The same thing happened in Bangalore but not with ICICI rather it is the public sector bank Corporation bank , JP Nagar Branch. I read the similar reports in the news paper also two years ago. This issue is that these banks outsource the money loading part to some third party. This was reveled when one of the affected customer ( good citizen ) corned the concern bank manager. He expressed his inability that the third party loading of money might introduced this problem. In my opinion the fake currency printers should be given capital punishment and any circulations should get life term. However, the law will apply very much to the person who has the fake currency in his possession knowingly and unknowingly. This is the reality and we still live in the fake notes :)

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Sudhir Parasuram is an employee of HCL Technologies Ltd, working for Cisco Systems Inc. Everything here, though, is his personal opinion and is not read or approved by others before it is posted. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here.